The Moment I Become Black

This doctoral research investigates how artistic practice can operate as a decolonial and feminist mode of knowledge production under conditions shaped by exile, postcolonial contradiction, and unequal recognition. Beginning from a sustained concern with women’s participation in liberation struggle, nation-building, and post-independence life, it asks how women’s resistance, mediated voice, and political significance have been trivialised, misrepresented, or erased within heroic national histories and dominant archival forms. From this starting point, the research asks what kind of methodology becomes necessary when the archive fails to hold oral, embodied, and community-held forms of knowledge, and when artistic research must move beyond representing marginalised histories toward allowing them to shape the terms of inquiry itself.Grounded in Indigenous research paradigms, dialogue, orature, and Writing as Making, the research treats language as material and understands writing not as external commentary, but as part of the artistic process itself — a physical mode through which thinking manifests. It places Frantz Fanon and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson into a tactical, non-hierarchical encounter in order to think across emancipation, gender, nation-building, and mediated voice. Through this encounter, it develops (Re)Pair as a methodological and artistic framework for bringing fractured histories, objects, and epistemic positions into relation without forcing them into sameness. From this emerges the Imaginative Reclaim, a critical and artistic process that begins from rupture rather than restoration, asking what may be re-entered, re-voiced, refigured, and restaged after epistemicide, dispossession, and historical fracture.Methodologically, the research moves through fieldwork, oral histories, process exhibition, collaborative inquiry, pedagogy, sound, sculpture, and experimental opera. Its findings demonstrate that exhibition, dialogue, oral citation, collaborative pedagogy, sculpture, sound, and opera can function not merely as forms of representation, but as interrelated modes of knowledge production. This contribution is most fully expression in Looking for Mukamusaba: An Experimental Opera, where orality, women’s resistance, myth, spiritual and historical reclamation, geopolitics, sculptural sound, and the ethics of listening are brought into a single operatic field. The research contributes to decolonial artistic research by showing that oral, embodied, feminist, materially written, and community-held epistemologies can reshape not only the content but also the forms, methods, and ethics of inquiry. keywords: